Join us on Twitter and IRC (#ludumdare on Afternet.org) for the Theme Announcement!

Thanks everyone for coming out! For the next 3 weeks, we’ll be Playing and Rating the games you created.You NEED ratings to get a score at the end. Play and Rate games to help others find your game.We’ll be announcing Ludum Dare 36’s August date alongside the results.

New Server: Welcome to the New (less expensive) Server! Find any problems? Report them here.

EDIT: Nevermind, I made a fool out of myself asking for something that was already here and that I was not aware of. But on a side note, it seems the comments that I’ve given aren’t appearing under the corresponding section, might there be something I’m doing wrong or that i’m not aware of?

I know it might not be a wise idea to expand the Feedback Friends site knowing that the new site is coming, but a nice feature would be to have a way to know how many games we have commented so far. And a bit like the old ratings display of the previous LDs, it would also be cool to see which games we have commented on, in order to keep track of our most/least favorites and this kind of thing.

I didn’t want to make a post just for that but I couldn’t find a place dedicated to that.

If you have played The Wewelsburg Experiment, maybe you didn’t know that there is an EXIT you have to find and that the castle is brand new, generatedevery time you play.

We didn’t have time to watch people outside the team play to get feedback, and we’ve been getting feedback now that make us think that. And so, we wanted you to know :). Open the map and try to get out of the castle!

Hey, everyone! I’ve finally managed to settle in a bit to continue playing your games. I know we had quite the lengthy experience last night, playing a very enjoyable (but lengthy to stream) board game created during Ludum Dare — but we’ll be going back to our regularly-scheduled list now!

I’m going to continue to play in accordance to how people show up in chat via the stream, to give the best personal feedback possible. Just remember that I will be playing all the games on my list regardless, so even if you don’t jump in during a stream, I will continue to play, rate and give feedback to your entry when I’m able to!

Night two and I’ve already got quite a substantial list to work through.

Don’t worry — if you don’t want me to play your game until you’re around, I will keep it on the list until you are! We’re cool about that ’round here.

I also had some curious people watching the stream last night — feel free to pop in and just discuss game development if you wish. It’s totally awesome and completely acceptable to have micro-discussions and the more people other than myself giving feedback , the better. I go over a lot, but I can’t discuss everything! It’s simply not humanly possible. 😀

I would have posted this earlier but the site was going down in flames as the theme was announced — and what a theme it is.

I’m so thrilled to be in the team I am this round — Rachel Rios is back (not coding like last time, to her gargantuan level of relief) and we’re joining forces with two of the people that helped create “Bugged Out” last round — Daniel Snd and Thiago Adamo PxlDJ — to form a SUPER MEGA AWESOME TEAM.

The LudumDaVengers, if you will.

While we’ve already gotten things underway in terms of conceptual idea, I wanted to make my first post about a couple of things close to my heart — first and foremost: my Ludum Diet.

(Aw yisss two Ludum Dare puns already and barely 150 words in.)

I think most of us can relate to theMeatly’s comic about Game Jamming, and what such activities do to our bodies. While I do work hard, and get barely any sleep, my worst offense out of all of these is I starve myself. Not on purpose, mind. I literally forget to eat. Unlike some, I do not have a personal sla — I mean, husband/wife/mom/dad/girlfriend/boyfriend/sibling who will cook for me. When I do manage to eat, my diet is in shambles and I go right for the bad stuff.

Well this time, it’s going to be different.

Three days. One game. Broccoli and carrots.

That’s right. No energy drinks. No nachos. No chips or doughnuts. No pizza. No fast food. Everything’s pre-prepped, packaged, and ready to be consumed. The only naughty things I’ll allow are coffee and alcohol (because beer), and a bit of that chocolate bar I had stashed away for later.

I will also be sharing some of the recipes/tricks I’m doing to ensure I’m eating healthy food through the whole weekend.

Friday, 17th:

– On Thursday I prepped a “Veggie Bucket”. This is, literally, a very large tupperware bucket filled with chopped vegetables, ready to eat with your fingers. This one’s pretty easy to put together, and it keeps really well in a sealed container. Go to the grocery store, pick out whatever veggies you love, bring them home, chop them up and throw them into the bucket. Whenever you need something, those veggies will always be there to give you nutritious fuel.

– Three words: Avocado. Chocolate. Pudding. Food of the gods. Best stuff I’ve ever eaten. Full of nutrients and the good fats your brain needs to come up with the best ideas. Get yourself a blender and 5 nearly ripe avocados. Scoop the avacado innards (minus the big pit) into the blender. Add 1/2 a cup of moo milk or coconut milk. Add 7 tablespoons cocoa. Add 10 tablespoons honey. Put in some vanilla extract and a couple pinches of salt. Blend. Feast. Enjoy. (Best chilled with a sliced up banana.)

ALSO: I will be streaming again for sure after Ludum Dare.

I would like to stream during Ludum Dare. I was thinking of doing a “Daily Feedback Hour” where people can throw me questions, progress images, current builds, etc, to get quick feedback on the fly. I can’t do it the entire day, but I’m more interested in seeing if people would like something like that.

Not been too great today. As we get closer to Christmas, it starts turning into a perpetual wave of get-togethers and celebrations and food and a lack of a spare 6-8 hours where I can sit and give more feedback! I’m getting close to the end of my list though. Once I run out of games (I’ve played, rated and given loads of feedback to 79 gamesat present), or when I make it to 100 (whichever comes first, dependent on how many people continue to add to the list and how many games I’ve had my eye on but haven’t played yet), I will stop. I need to get back to my RL work — oh. And —

THE FULL POST-LD VERSION OF “A FINE WHITE LINE” IS IMMANENT!

That’s right, everyone!! I’ve finally gotten some things straightened out, and a full-on, post-LD version of “A Fine White Line” is NOW in production!

DanielSnd , who worked on “BUGGED OUT” during this LD has been graciously taking his time to help me with a well-thought out programming structure for the game. I have so much heart-felt appreciation for this, like you WOULDN’T BELIEVE.

I’m going to crack open a Shafterbury, get comfortable and get back to playing some of these games! I’ll be giving out more wicked feedback while I rate and comment on every game I play. Everyone is welcome, no matter your game or how utterly horrible you think it is!

So first of all, thank you for the huge amount of positive feedback and ratings on Glow Drop so far! I don’t think I have gotten this much rating and appraisal before in a Ludum Dare event! So I’ve been taking in your feedback and lots of people want to see a mobile version, so I am giving into your demands and will release Glow Drop onto Android and Windows Phone 8!

(Sorry iOS users, but I cannot afford to develop and release a game onto the App Store at this time)

However, I think it’s fair in saying that this shouldn’t be a simple release. I feel as though this game could do with a little bit more work to feel more worthy for people to download. So I’ve been taking in some of the feedback from both the Ludum Dare page and so I have a list of things that can be done to polish up the game a bit more:

Visual Identifiers – Mostly stuff like how the drops react when they are destroyed or what happens when they start overflowing the screen.

More Special White Drops – The current game has three, and there is plenty of opportunity to expand the possibilities of these drops.

Improve/Extend Music – I am extremely happy and surprised with the amount of people that liked the soundtrack. I didn’t have much time to properly flesh out the music so I feel I can use some time to either extend it to a longer loop, make it feel less repetitive and/or remix the existing music to a new genre (I was thinking progressive trance but feel free to tell me otherwise).

Global Leaderboard – While it’s nice enough to keep a saved highscore, it’s much better to also compare it with people around the world. I’m not sure what’s the best option to implement this for me, but it’s worth looking into. I know GameJolt has a leaderboard system in its API but for mobile it’s gonna be different for each platform unless I try a platform-free tool to handle it.

Well, I don’t care for the new “embed your game directly into the game page” feature.

What happens, I like to browse for games that look interesting to play, and then open each game’s page in a new tab. With a game playing in a tab, suddenly I have a lot of resources going to running the game in a browser tab I’m not even focused on, and also audio playing in multiple tabs, probably with no quick/easy way to mute it.

This could be fixed fairly easily by including a “play embedded” button for games that use the embed in page feature, and then don’t actually start running the game until the button is clicked.

Results

After two pretty terrible LDs I knew, when I put the keyboard down, that this time it had been different. I had a pretty decent idea from the get go. And even if I had troubles with parts of the execution, I was able to sneak in a lot more polish than in previous LDs. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Here are the scores (LD22 positions are multiplied from 891 to 1400 entries).

Category

LD22*

LD23

LD24

LD25

Overall

#344 (2.95)

#524 (2.81)

#504 (2.73)

#142 (3.42)

Theme

#765 (2.25)

#231 (3.41)

#209 (3.32)

#24 (4.13)

Fun

#285 (2.78)

#674 (2.36)

#553 (2.45)

#200 (3.19)

Innovation

#329 (2.80)

#451 (2.89)

#253 (3.14)

#220 (3.17)

Graphics

#482 (2.73)

#563 (2.64)

#677 (2.05)

#263 (3.19)

Audio

#490 (2.31)

#246 (2.94)

N/A

#194 (2.94)

Humor

#395 (2.10)

#307 (2.49)

#142 (2.89)

#161 (3.14)

Mood

#738 (1.95)

#492 (2.60)

#562 (2.25)

#205 (3.09)

I’m pretty happy about theme. This high score means that I was able to pass the image of my game to the players. There were quite a few “reverse-x” games in this LD — but the thing about reverse-games is that, for you to feel like the villain of the original game, the reverse game must be as close to the original as possible. This was one of my design guidelines – score, gameplay, graphics, whenever I was able, I tried to mimic the original Pacman.

Graphics and Audio are as expected. Not super high, but higher than my previous entries. I feel more confident with my toolchain, and I’m happy with the result. It is worth noting that although Audio was my lowest score, it was not my lowest placement. This shows how audio making is one of the largest barriers in this competition.

I was expecting Fun to be a bit lower, since many people complained about the controls, and the AI frankly sucked. But I guess when people “like” the game, all the scores go a bit higher together. That also goes for humor – I have no idea why I got a 3.14 score, since I did not include anything humorous in my game.

I would love if anyone who voted in my game could comment on the “mood” score. I usually rate mood based on the “consistent feel” of the game (which mine wasn’t quite there), and the “not done by my nephew” factor (does not feel TOO amateurish – decent opening, transitions, desktop behavior, etc).

Post Mortem

Set-up

LD23 and LD24 were two failures for me. In both cases I had quite pretentious ideas that didn’t live to their full potential. So even before the theme was decided I decided that I would go with a simple action game, probably a shooter. As the LD approached, the idea of making a QiX game was growing in me.

When the theme was announced, I quickly decided to make a “reverse-classical-game”, and sat down to think which classical games would be a)realistic to make and b)fun to play. Pacman and QiX were at the top of my shortlist. In the end, I decided to go with Pacman because since QiX is a really old game, I was afraid many people wouldn’t “get” it.

Making the game

This is the fourth time that I make a game using the JAVA + SLICK2D combo. Even though I hadn’t programmed in a while, I was still familiar enough with the basic API, which helped. I’m starting to feel some limitations on the SLICK2D library though. If I did this for a living, I would probably start to look for a new library about now, but I want to get a bit better at short game jams before worrying about that. I would probably get more bang for my book by learning how to properly compose simple songs, or getting a more consistent graphics style.

Development was pretty straight. I managed to add some bells and whistles such as transitions, pauses, high scores, etc. I wasted a LOT of time on the Pacman AI. My BASIC idea about how the Pacman AI should work was wrong, and instead of realizing that I should redo it from scratch, I tried many different small adjustments to it. All in all I lost a lot of time here that could have been spent on other things.

Another thing that was bad in the development is that I couldn’t get people to playtest my entry. Playtest is SUPER important. Many of the comments from the reviewers mentioned that it was hard keeping track of which ghost was selected with which number. Many simple solutions were suggested. This is the kind of stuff that a little play testing by someone other than me would have caught quite quickly.

Positives and Negatives

The good:

I was familiar with Slick2d, and that made a lot of stuff faster. Even if I didn’t know how to do something, I knew where to look.

I started using Inkscape a lot, which is good for non-pixel drawing (such as the game board).

“If it is not moving on the screen, it can be drawn on the background”

I started to get used to mixing sound effects in BFXR, for some cooler results than using single samples.

Simple fade-out transition: draw a blank square on the screen and mess with transparency

The simpler your game idea is, the more time you have to refine it!

The bad:

I should have written cleaner code. My code was so messy that it was hard to add simple things such as a difficulty progression based on changing pacman’s speed/power length.

I’m starting to get tired of autotracker’s music. People who have never heard it like it, but it gets old really fast.

Using Angelfont in a Linux environment is really hard – I will have to find some other library to use/package fonts in my game.

It seems that java applets are unreliable in Ubuntu. I can’t even play my old java applet entries anymore in any of my ubuntu boxes :-(.

Not getting anyone to playtest my game was REALLY bad.

I lost a lot of time banging my head against pacman’s AI, when I should have done something simpler (Greedy search?).

Timelapse

This time I added the title music of my game to the time lapse! It is so much better than a silent timelapse!

Curse of Goats

Finally, a little bit of a rant. I think the goat thing went overboard this LD. I saw too many games where goats were pushed in, without thought. I think this is because the optional theme was put in the announcements this time (unlike kittens in LD22, which was mostly a thing spread through word of blogpost). Since it shared the same space as the official theme, many people might have thought it was also obligatory or something. While I love silliness a lot more than the average people, forced jokes get bad real quick. I suggest that the joke theme is not supported officially in LD26.